About the same time as Steve McIntyre began examining the transcript between Sir "Humphrey" Hoskins and Lord Lawton I had a mind to complain to the BBC trust that if there were lies told in the now infamous meeting they were told by Sir Brian Hoskins. Steve's analysis is much more scholarly than mine, but then I wanted to put together something that would hold the attention of an arts graduate who'd never done a proper day's work in his/her life and who hates people outside of the progressive tent with a passion. So I tried to keep it simple. What I would ask fellow bloggers to do is to (a) point out the mistakes and (b) suggest improvements. It's long I know but I would really appreciate your collective inputs, as for any errors don't be slow in telling me, I am beyond embarrassment when it comes to fubaring.

Justin Webb, BBC: Is there a link, Sir Brian, between the rain we have seen falling in recent days and global warming?

Sir Brian Hoskins: There’s no simple link – we can’t say yes or no this is climate change. However, there’s a number of reasons to think that such events are now more likely. One of those is that a warmer atmosphere that we have can contain more water vapour and so a storm can bring that water vapour out of the atmosphere and we’re seeing more heavy rainfall events around the world. We’ve certainly seen those here.

See what Sir Brian did there? He said there’s no “simple” link, and then went on to say there is a link because the excess water vapour caused by warming would give heavy rainfall events around the world. Here’s what Dr. Roger Peilke Jr. an AGW believer and expert in storms and the damage they cause has to say:

"There were no major hurricanes in the North Atlantic Basin for the first time since 1994. And the number of hurricanes this year was the lowest since 1982."

In fact the number and intensity of tropical cyclones (aka hurricanes) has dropped over the last ten years, or so.

Justin Webb: So it’s the heavy rainfall; it’s the severity of the event that points us in this direction?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Well, in this event we’ve had severe rainfall but we’ve also had persistence, and that’s where I say we just don’t know whether the persistence of this event is due to climate change or not. Another aspect is sea level rise – the sea level has risen about 20cm over the 20th Century and is continuing to rise as the system warms, and that, of course, makes damage in the coastal region that much greater when we get some event there.

This whole statement is untrue with the exception of “…we just don’t know whether the persistence of this event is due to climate change or not.”

The Accumulated Cyclone Energy globally is 88% of the norm in 2014 and it was 70% of the norm in 2013 according to Dr. Ryan Maue of WeatherBell Analytics.

Sea level has been rising at around 3mm/annum since around 1850, Sir Brian only mentioned the 20th century, it well known that the sea level rises started long before humans put CO2 in the atmosphere, as did the warming atmosphere.

Justin Webb: But can a reasonable person – possessed of the evidence as it is known to us at the moment – say look at the rain we’ve had recently and say “I do not believe that the evidence exists that links that rain to global warming?”

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think the reasonable person should look at this event – they should look at extremes around the world: the general rise in temperature that’s well recorded, the reduction in Arctic sea ice, the rise in sea level, the number of extreme rainfall events around the world, the number of extreme events that we’ve had – we’ve had persistent droughts, we’ve had floods, we’ve had cold spells and very warm spells. The number of records being broken is just that much greater.

A reasonable scientist would look at the IPCC SREX report which states categorically that no connection can be made between individual weather events and climate. Also he mentions the Arctic sea ice as evidence of global warming but doesn’t mention the record sea ice in the Antarctic.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson, it’s joining the dots isn’t it?

Lord Lawson: No, I think that Sir Brian is right on a number of points. He’s right, first of all, that nobody knows. Certainly it is not the case, of course, that this rainfall is due to global warming – the question is whether global warming has marginally exacerbated it. Nobody knows that. He’s right too to say that you have to look at the global picture, and contrary to what he may have implied, people have done studies to show that globally there has been no increase in extreme weather events. For example, tropical storms – perhaps the most dramatic form of weather event – the past year has been unusually quiet year for tropical storms. And again going back to the “nobody knows,” only a couple of months ago the Met Office were forecasting that this would be an unusually dry winter.

All true and backed up by NOAA and IPCC reports.

Justin Webb: Do you accept that, Sir Brian, just on that important point about the global picture – do you accept that we haven’t seen the extreme conditions that we might have expected?

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think we have seen these heavy rainfall events around the world. We’ve seen a number of places breaking records – Australia with the temperatures going to new levels.

Spin again the IPCC clearly stated that individual weather events cannot be linked to climate change in the IPCC SREX report, moreover any scientist would tell you that hot weather in Australia does not provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming.

Justin Webb: The trouble is we report those, and we’re interested in them, but there is an effect that is possibly an obfuscatory effect on the real picture, and you accept that that might be the case?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Absolutely, and we have to be very careful to not say “oh there’s records everywhere therefore climate is changing.” But we are very sure that the temperature has risen by about 0.8 degrees, the arctic sea ice has reached a minimum level in the summer which hasn’t been seen for a very, very long time, the Greenland ice sheet and the west Antarctic ice sheet have been measured to be decreasing. There are all the signs that we are changing this climate system. Now as we do this – as the system warms – it doesn’t just warm uniformly, the temperature changes by different amounts in different regions. That means that the weather that feeds off those temperature contrasts is changing and will change. It’s not just a smooth change – it’s a change in the weather. It’s a change in the regional climate we can expect.

Amazing bit of sophistry from Sir Brian, he says “the Arctic sea ice has reached a minimum level in the summer which hasn’t been seen for a very, very long time…” In fact we’ve only been able to monitor the Arctic sea ice since 1979, so he has no idea what the sea ice extent was a very, very long time ago. There are indications that there was much less sea ice in the past when Amundsen navigated the North West Passage in 1903 to 1906, or in 1922 when this report was sent from the Arctic:

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.
Washington Post, November 1922

He also forgot to mention that global sea ice is actually at record levels, surely the listeners should have all the relevant information made available to them? In fact while the Arctic sea ice has fluctuated since the satellite records began the Antarctic sea ice has increased steadily throughout the period.

Here is the abstract from a paper on the Greenland and West Arctic ice sheets by Wouters et al 2013:

“The Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been reported to be losing mass at accelerating rates1, 2. If sustained, this accelerating mass loss will result in a global mean sea-level rise by the year 2100 that is approximately 43 cm greater than if a linear trend is assumed2. However, at present there is no scientific consensus on whether these reported accelerations result from variability inherent to the ice-sheet–climate system, or reflect long-term changes and thus permit extrapolation to the future3. Here we compare mass loss trends and accelerations in satellite data collected between January 2003 and September 2012 from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment to long-term mass balance time series from a regional surface mass balance model forced by re-analysis data. We find that the record length of spaceborne gravity observations is too short at present to meaningfully separate long-term accelerations from short-term ice sheet variability. We also find that the detection threshold of mass loss acceleration depends on record length: to detect an acceleration at an accuracy within ±10 Gt yr−2, a period of 10 years or more of observations is required for Antarctica and about 20 years for Greenland. Therefore, climate variability adds uncertainty to extrapolations of future mass loss and sea-level rise, underscoring the need for continuous long-term satellite monitoring.”

So Sir Brian is being “economical” with the truth when he says the science is telling us that the changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are a sign of global warming. The latest scientific papers say the time periods are too short to come to any definitive conclusions.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson?

Lord Lawson: I think we want to focus not on this extremely speculative and uncertain area – I don’t blame the climate scientists for not knowing. Climate and weather is quite extraordinarily complex and this is a very new form of science. All I blame them for is pretending they know when they don’t. Anyhow, what we ought to focus on is what we’re going to do. I think this is a wake-up call. We need to abandon this crazy and costly policy of spending untold millions on littering the countryside with useless wind turbines and solar panels, and moving from a sensible energy policy of having cheap and reliable forms of energy to a policy of having unreliable and costly energy. Give up that. What we want to focus on – it’s very important – is making sure this country is really resilient and robust to whatever nature throws at us, whether there’s a climate element or not. Flood defences, sea defences – that’s what we want to focus on.

Notice Lord Lawson tries to take the conversation from the science to the policies.

Justin Webb: Can I just put this to you? If there is a chance – and some people would say there is a strong chance that man-made global warming exists and is having an impact on us; doesn’t it make sense whether or not you believe that’s a 95% chance or a 50% chance or whatever, does it not make sense to take care to try to avoid the kind of emissions that may be contributing to it? What could be wrong with that?

Lord Lawson: Everything. First of all, even if there is warming – and there’s been no recorded warming over the past 15, 16, 17 years.

Absolutely true.

Justin Webb: Well, there is a lot of controversy about that.

No there is not.

Lord Lawson: No there’s not, that’s a fact. That is accepted even by the IPCC.

Again, absolutely true. Moreover the presenter clearly doesn’t believe Lord Lawson.

Justin Webb: There’s no measured warming?

Lord Lawson: Can I continue my sentence?

Justin Webb: Well alright, we’ll get back to that.

Lord Lawson: No measured warming, exactly. Well that measurement is not unimportant. But even if there is some problem, it is not going to affect any of the dangers except marginally. What we want to do is focus with the problems there are with climate – drought, floods and so on. These have happened in the past – they’re not new. As for emissions, this country is responsible for less than 2% of global emissions. Even if we cut our emissions to 0 – which would put us back to the pre-industrial revolution and the poverty that that gave – even if we did that, it would be outweighed by China’s increase in emissions in a single year. So it is absolutely crazy this policy. It cannot make sense at all.

Nothing untrue there either, and back to policy. Should the people of the UK be kept in the dark about the fact that the sacrifices demanded of them will result in no gain whatsoever? Lord Lawson isn’t challenging the science he’s saying the policies are futile.

Justin Webb: Sir Brian?

Sir Brian Hoskins: I think we have to learn two lessons from this. The first one is that by increasing the greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, particularly carbon dioxide, to levels not seen for millions of years on this planet, we are performing a very risky experiment. We’re pretty confident that that means if we go on like we are the temperatures are going to rise somewhere between 3-5 degrees by the end of this Century, sea levels up to half to 1 metre rise.

There is no confidence that the temperatures will rise by between 3 and 5 degrees the IPCC range of temperature increase is 1.5 to 4.5, and the latest report couldn’t get an agreement on a likely temperature rise, so Sir Brian either isn’t up with the scientific view, or is exaggerating the likely temperature increase.

Current sea level rise shows no sign of acceleration and is continuing to rise at 3mm/annum as it has done since 1850, it’s on course for around quarter of a metre by the end of the century.

Justin Webb: Lord Lawson was saying there that there had been a pause – which you hear a lot about – a pause of 10 / 15 years in measured rising of temperature. That is the case isn’t it?

Sir Brian Hoskins: It hasn’t risen very much over the last 10-15 years. If you measure the climate from the globally averaged surface temperature, during that time the excess energy has still been absorbed by the climate system and is being absorbed by the oceans.

Actually it hasn’t risen at all in the last 10 – 15 years.

“…the excess energy has still been absorbed by the climate system and is being absorbed by the oceans.”

This, as Lord Lawson said, is speculation. And one which should have begged the question, “Why has the atmosphere stopped warming?

Justin Webb: So it’s there somewhere?

Sir Brian Hoskins: Oh yes, it’s there in the oceans.

There is no proof that this is true anywhere in the scientific literature.

Lord Lawson: That is pure speculation.

True.

Sir Brian Hoskins: No, it’s a measurement.

This is not true, and surely Sir Brian knows this, a FRS. Firstly because the heat is purported to be deep in the oceans and is therefore unmeasurable. Sir Brian may be confusing this with the Levitus et al 2013 paper which found the heat in the top 2000 metres of the ocean to have increased by around 0.1C between 1955 and 2014. At this level at least it is clear in the data that although the oceans are heating at around 0.02C/decade there has been no increased acceleration of heating in the early part of this century. The heat increase Sir Brian is talking about can’t be, and hasn’t been, measured. Scientists who put together the Earth’s radiation budget are convinced that the Earth has an imbalance of between 0.6 and 0.9 watts/m^2/annum and therefore are convinced the heat must be there somewhere. It is, of course, entirely possible that they have the radiation budget calculations wrong and there is no retained heat. Guessing the heat got into the deep oceans without detection is not science, it’s speculation as Lord Lawson says.

Lord Lawson: No, it’s not. It’s speculation.

True there is no scientific evidence to support the conjecture that the heat is hiding in the deep oceans, and Sir Brian should be aware of that.

Justin Webb: Well, it’s a combination of the two isn’t it? As this whole discussion is…. Lord Lawson and Sir Brian Hoskins, thank you very much

The BBC subsequently said: “The ruling found a false balance was created in that the item implied Lord Lawson’s views on climate science were on the same footing as Sir Brian Hoskins.”

Yes there was a false balance Sir Brian Hoskins seems to have made the science up as he went along, while Lord Lawson manfully tried to move the conversation on from propaganda to policy.

The BBC subsequently apologised for letting Lord Lawson discuss the science with Sir Brian and promised it would never again give false balance to the argument. We are truly living in Oceania.

Give to me straight.

Thanks Mike your input is much appreciated. As it happens I don't much mind if they whole of my comments are replaced by better written and more cogent comments, that's the point of the exercise, to get better minds to improve the general gist of what I'm saying. What surprised me when I went through the transcripts was just how many dissimulations came from Hoskins, while in fact Lord Lawson made no attempt to discuss the science until Hoskins actually said the heat was in the deep oceans, surely knowing there was no proof. Why would he do that? Other than he's a paid Jeremy Grantham shill of course, like Bob Ward.

Please correct the spelling of the name in the heading. It is Lord Lawson that you write, is it not? (It currently says Lawton)

Thanks ANH1, that'll confuse 'em. I'll try to fix it later.

Thanks GeoffChambers for the nice words. I have updated this version with Mike's suggestion. I would like to proceed by (a) making sure that the sources I've quoted are the latest science (b) accurate and (c) to make it more pithy. I know this is unusual, but the BBC Trust actually found for me in a complaint I made about an interview with Lord Oxburgh. (they found against me on a charge I hadn't made - bias, but I learned quite a lot from the experience. First off keep it focussed, a chance remark I made about Lord Oxburgh outwith the actual complaint became the main focus of the BBC's response, so the lines of demarcation have to be clear. I haven't decided yet how to phrase the complaint, I found that important too. Like all people the BBC don't take to complaints too easily, and will, as I say, turn their entire focus onto something that isn't central to the matter if you're not careful.

To that end I welcome all criticism and advice, and thanks to Mike for his, which I've taken on board. In particular the making sure to use language that is utilitarian rather than bordering on the ad hom. (although it was a piece of sophistry I guess Mike had it in right, there's no need to say so as long as the point is made).

Another problem is of course, I'm not a climate scientist, and for the arty farty types at the BBC who can't wire a 13 amp plug it will be inconceivable that someone who isn't actually a scientist in that discipline could provide a critique of one who is. (They, of course, don't mind people who've been employed by the state, or the state's money for the whole of their lives criticising others who have built businesses and created jobs).

I'm encouraged by what has been said so far, but would like a little bit more, if you'll forgive the term, negative feedback, my own opinion is that it's 5/6 out of 10 at the moment.

Thanks again for comments and criticisms keep 'em coming.